Happiness is a complex emotion of general positive feelings, such as joy and contentment. Many psychological studies have correlated happiness with good health, purpose and overall life satisfaction. However, how much of one’s happiness is influenced by where they live and related factors beyond one’s control?

Despite being difficult to quantify, the Cantril life ladder aims to do this with a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the most happy and 0 being the least.

This study aims to explore the corelation between happiness and common metrics of a well-run country in 2023.

country_code country happiness_2023 gdp_2023 development_2023 gini_2023 corruption_2023
46 FIN Finland 77.0 45400.0 0.948 27.3 87.0
66 ISL Iceland 75.6 59300.0 0.972 26.1 72.0
38 DNK Denmark 75.0 61300.0 0.962 30.4 90.0
32 CRI Costa Rica 73.8 14300.0 0.833 50.5 55.0
107 NLD Netherlands 72.5 51300.0 0.955 30.5 79.0
127 SLE Sierra Leone 34.7 1110.0 0.467 38.3 35.0
28 COD Congo, Dem. Rep. 33.8 538.0 0.522 46.6 20.0
20 BWA Botswana 33.3 7270.0 0.731 55.0 59.0
101 MWI Malawi 32.7 557.0 0.517 47.7 34.0
0 AFG Afghanistan 14.5 378.0 0.496 39.9 20.0

The economic health of a country can be measured with its gross domestic profit (GDP) per capita ($USD). This measures the amount of economic activity generated in a year divided by its population. We can see here a correlation between GDP/capita and happiness, concentrated in North America, Europe and Oceana. However, this is not always correlated, since Costa Rica is one of the happiess countries yet with a lower GDP/capita, so we must investigate beyond this metric.

A healthy society can be attributed to low inequality among the population and continuous development in quality of life. The Gini coefficient reprersents income inequality in a society, with a higher number being more inequality. Human Development Index is an index used to rank countries by level of “human development”. It contains three dimensions: health level, educational level and living standard.

We can see here patters with lower inequality and higher development correlate with happiness.

Lastly, the integrity of those in power can greatly determine how a country is run. The corruption perception index ranks countries/territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be from 0 to 100, in which 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. We see a strong pattern between happiness and less corruption, with also correlates with GDP/capita likely as a result of a well-run country.